Germany's weekly production from coal- and gas-fired power plants dropped to a record low last week as a surge in wind power, rising supply from nuclear facilities as well as a national holiday last Tuesday reduced the need for such plants, the weekly analysis of power generation data shows.
Record low demand for fossil-fuel power plants also pushed the weekly spot power average to its lowest level since May last year, with daily spot settlements averaging just below Eur21/MWh last week amid a number of hourly negative prices, data from Epex Spot shows.
Output from coal-fired power plants was 0.53 TWh in week 40, according to transparency data aggregated by Fraunhofer ISE -- the lowest weekly output for coal recorded since at least 2010 or as far as the data reaches back.
Output from major CCGT gas plants that report under transparency rules was 0.38 TWh, just marginally above multi-year lows recorded in August, according to the Fraunhofer energy charts.
Beyond the October 3 national holiday, the key reason for the weekly downward trend was a surge in wind power last week with the second major storm this autumn again just narrowly missing hourly records, the TSO data aggregated by Fraunhofer ISE shows.
Overall, wind generated 4 TWh last week, averaging 23.8 GW each hour, the second-highest weekly output ever recorded with only week 8 in February slightly higher, the data shows.
Nuclear production reached its second-highest week so far in 2017 with all eight remaining reactors online, generating 1.65 TWh, while lignite coal added a further 2 TWh, the weekly data shows.
However drilling into the hourly data, the wind surge and resulting negative hourly prices also impacted lignite plants, ramping down to their lowest level since the Christmas week in 2015, the data shows.
The start of October also removed a further 600 MW of old lignite units from the market with RWE's Frimmersdorf units P, Q now part of Germany's growing reserve power plants.
In terms of price response, the German day-ahead baseload average spot plunged from levels around Eur39/MWh in the previous two weeks to Eur20.80/MWh, its lowest so far this year, data from spot exchange Epex Spot shows.
